Description

Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, in the far north of Ontario, and grew up in Toronto.

She is the author of seven internationally acclaimed novels: The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France; Changing Heaven; Away, winner of the Trillium Award and a finalist for the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and for Britain’s Booker Prize; and A Map of Glass, a finalist for a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, and Sanctuary Line, a finalist for Giller Prize.

She is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Storm Glass, and four books of poetry, I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan, and Some Other Garden.

Her work, which is published in many countries, has been translated into numerous foreign languages. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award and the Harbourfront Festival Prize, and is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and is an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Urquhart has received numerous honorary doctorates from Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto and the Royal Military College, and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and, during the winter and spring of 1997, she held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto.

She has also given readings and lectures in Canada, Britain, Europe, the U.S.A., and Australia, has twice been a keynote speaker at the annual Canadian Congress of the Humanities, and has served on the Board of PEN Canada and on the Advisory Board for the Restoration of the Vimy Memorial. She has served on several international prize juries including that of the International Dublin IMPAC Award, the Giller Prize, The Governor Generals Award Fiction Jury, and the American International Neustadt Award.

Jane Urquhart lives in South-Eastern Ontario with her husband, artist Tony Urquhart, and

for the past two decades, has spent part of each year in County Kerry Ireland.
Her new novel, The Night Stages, will be released in April by Farrar Straus Giroux in the USA, McClelland and Stewart in Canada, and Oneworld in the UK.